Eyebrows McGee is a young woman living in the emotional heartland of America: Peoria, that infamous bellwether constantly cited by the clueless culturati, as in, "But will it play in Peoria?" Eyebrows gives you a ground-level view of what's actually playing in Peoria.

That movie (Yearling) slayed me as a kid. And so did Charlotte's Web. When that spider died...well! You couldn't sponge my face dry for days.

But the wierd thing about being a boy is that, at the same age, I could hike in the woods with my pellet gun for hours and shoot anything that moved. Just for the sport of it. I killed more birds than I can possibly remember -- for no other reason than the shear joy of shooting things.

I had an otherwise healthy, happy childhood (I think I might be one of five or six people who did). But that's one more weird dichotomy that sticks out to me now.

It's just part of being a boy, I guess. The hunter gene's hard wired into the system.